Customizing Fedora 4

Although Red Hat sticks by a six to twelve month release cycle
for its Fedora Core Project the number of FOSS advancements made in that short
period is simply staggering. With the huge number of updates that roll out for
Fedora is simply jaw dropping as since Fedora Core 4's release earlier this
year there has been a staggering amount of updates from SELinux to ALSA. In
fact right now on their FTP server alone is over 839 RPM updates for a single
architecture. With the number of Fedora fresh installs we perform on a weekly
basis using all sorts of hardware, and with Fedora Core 5 not being scheduled
for release until at least February of 2006, we have begun to work on optimizing
the FC4 build to provide for local install CDs that are up-to-date when it comes
to all of the packages as well as including some Fedora extras in the stock
install and Phoronix additions. Although the fundamentals for re-mastering the
CD and simply changing around packages and modifying a file here and there are
relatively easy, this project would not be recommended for the novice GNU/Linux
user. We will keep this guide short and sweet, and not provide all of the standard
steps that are needed, simply providing the guidelines for customizing the Fedora
Core 4 install as they have changed slightly since previous Fedora Core revisions
and even the old versions of Red Hat. For reference, the root build tree was
/home/phoronix/Desktop/stage. Below are the various steps and on the following
page is the package list we used for the newly created Fedora CDs. As always,
proceed at your own risk, as many of these commands need to be executed as a
super-user.

Through re-mastering the CD, additional packages can be implemented,
such as those from the Fedora Extras repository, or to simply provide updated
packages on the install CDs such as the latest kernel and GNOME release. In
addition, many other modifications can be done as well as tweaks to Anaconda
through their various Python scripts. Although our build was for i386, the same process can be applied to any
architecture from x86_64 to Power PC. For reference, on the following pages
is our pkgfile.txt output to see the various packages we have updated as well
as changed. When it comes down to re-mastering/customizing any Linux distribution,
the possibilities are simply endless.